Balearic Islands

The Balearic Islands are an archipelago of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula; Palma de Mallorca served as their capital. The islands were originally known as the "Gymnesiae", meaning "nude islands"; the Greeks claimed that the islands were settled by shipwrecked Boeotians who were cast nude on the islands. The islands were further colonized by Rhodians after the Trojan War of 1250-1240 BC, and the population of the island remained nude until the Phoenicians clothed them with tunics. They founded the town of Mago (now Mao, Minorca), and, after the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, the islands became independent. In 123 BC, the Roman Republic conquered the islands after associating them with piracy, and their general Quintus Caecilius Metellus Balearicus settled 3,000 Roman and Spanish colonists on the islands and founded Palma and Pollentia. In 468 AD, the Vandals conquered the islands from the Western Roman Empire, but Belisarius reconquered the islands for the Eastern Roman Empire in 534 AD. In 707 AD, an Umayyad fleet forced the locals to submit to the caliphate, but allowed them to continue their traditions and religion and have a high degree of autonomy. The islands became pirate bases, and, in 902 AD, the Emirate of Cordoba annexed the islands. In 1115, during the Reconquista, a crusader sack of Palma ended the islands' status as a sea power, and the islands were conquered by Jaume I of Aragon in 1229. Menorca fell in 1232 and Ibiza in 1235, and the Kingdom of Mallorca ruled over the islands until the Aragonese conquest in 1349. The islands were frequently attacked by Barbary pirates from North Africa, and, in 1713, the islands were ceded to Great Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht. They were returned to Spain in 1783 at the end of the American Revolutionary War, and the islands would eventually become an autonomous community of Spain. In 2017, the islands had a population of 1,115,999 people.